The Great Erection: Standing Desks Are On the Rise

I did an interview with the New York Observer on standing desks. The reporter messed up my diet, but otherwise it's a great piece.

"John Durant eats raw foods and lean meats [WTF?] as a follower of the Paleo Diet, and owns a lifestyle brand themed around mimicking ancient human behavior in modern times. He tried to build a standing desk in 2006, using a milk crate and a variety of objects he found around the Midtown management consulting office where he worked as an associate. The contraption lasted for two days. Standing at work felt awkward, and, judging by the sideways glances of his colleagues, it looked equally odd. “Coworkers think it’s goofy and they tease you about it,” he explained. “It makes them feel like they’re lazy. It’s like being the one person at the office birthday who turns down a piece of cake. ‘Just eat the cake!’” He sat back down for four years."

I eat raw and cooked foods. I also eat lots of fat from both plant and animal sources.

Here's the whole article, interesting throughout.

Paleolithic tea service

I've never seen evidence of a "Paleolithic Tea Service"....until now.

That's in San Francisco somewhere. Thanks to Matt Stern for the photos.

This is just scary

Michael Tomasky defends Mike Bloomberg at the Daily Beast:

"Are bacon-cheeseburgers next? As a practical matter, no. Sodas are an easy target because there is nothing, nothing, nutritionally redeeming about them. But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things."

That's just insane.

Message to Bloomberg: Salt isn't bad for you

Hopefully Mike Bloomberg reads Gary Taubes' article on salt in the NYT:

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

Read the whole thing. And stop worrying about salt.

Locality and decision-making

I have increasing distrust for decision-making as the unit gets further away from the individual and family.

Individual - Drink as much soda pop as you like or ban it from your own diet, I don't care.

Family - I have no problem with parental authority to ban soda pop for their children. Some families do, some don't, others restrict it in various ways -- either way, it's not a big deal.

City - Of any level of government, I have the most tolerance for local, city-level decisions. I can live with individual cities deciding whether they want to welcome fast food restaurants or not -- and many already do.

State - Would strongly oppose a soda pop size restriction.

Nation - Don't tell me what I can or can't put into my body.

United Nations - Can you imagine the UN trying to ban the size of soda pop? Laughable.

The city -- or city-state -- is actually the best place for experimentation with rule systems. Just look at Hong Kong or Singapore.  I'm looking forward to more free cities when they get off the ground in Honduras. The city-state is where most of the innovation should take place, because they're easy to leave if people don't like the rules.

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